Yes, it's true. After a long 5 years of waiting for the next great product, at RSA Conference 2009 this year, we bestowed the prestigious NSS Labs Gold Award to IBM/ISS for it's Proventia Network IPS GX6116. IBM's was the first IPS to pass our new requirements for Gold, including the monthly recurring Security Update Monitor (SUM) program testing.
The GX6116 scored an average of 98.6% over the 3 consecutive months of testing. This new recurring testing program ensures that vendors are keeping up with current threat protection levels as advertised. Each month our engineers add new attacks to the test set according to our modified CVSS ranking of enterprise-relevant vulnerabilities. Unlike other tests, the vendors do not know which exploits will be used in this blind test. So 98.6% is pretty impressive. Most other products don't do nearly as well.
Also to be commended is the 8Gbps of real-world throughput achieved by the GX. Certainly, the IBM team worked hard and should be proud of their accomplishments on this rigorous test program. Here is Brian Truskowski, General Manager of IBM/ISS, accepting the NSS Gold Award; and his team: Dan Holden, John Pirc, Eric York, Greg Adams.
IBM isn't the only participant in the program. You can look forward to monthly testing from McAfee as well (coming soon).
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